The Fifth Hour: Piggly Wiggly Problems

I didn't do the show overnight obviously, because that was the day we were done. We did the podcast yesterday. There's some decent stuff in the NFL that you just roll your eyes at. For example, Todd munkin the monk Man, the coach of the Cleveland Browns now who is just hired this week, who claimed that the Baltimore Ravens tried to draft Shouldher Sanders, like he was trying to suck up to Shudhur Sanders. I don't know if you saw this or not, tried to suck up to him, and

then he claimed that they tried to draft him. Shudhur Sanders was drafted in the middle actually closer to the end of the draft, Like when were they planning on drafting him? He was the one hundred and forty fourth overall pick in the fifth round the draft's only seven rounds, Like were they well six rounds? Like what are they waiting for they got? I mean, it's ridiculous. So I saw that that was amusing and I got a lot

of him. But by the way, this podcast, we're gonna have not a mensa and hum baby, not a mensa and humbaby baby. So I got several emails people upset that I was not on the show last night, which always I'm always surprised by this because it's not that they wanted to hear the show. They just wanted to

hear a monologue about the Vikings. So based on the feedback, I'm going to do an emergency mal monologue right now here on the Fifth Hour podcast because a number of my brothers and sisters that live in the great state of Minnesota in the Greater Minneapolis area were upset because the Vikings did something that was very bizarre for late January. I haven't you heard about it? Or maybe not, perhaps you were not paying attention. So the Vikings handed a

box to their GM, Quazy adopha mensa. They said, all right, crazy, here, I want you to have this box. What's in the box? All right? So we opened the box and there was there was something pink in there and it appeared to be a slip. So he was given a pink slip. That's right. The Vikings they whacked their general manager as he spent the week scouting college players for the upcoming NFL Draft. And the coaching carousel is about done, right about done. The Raiders and the Cardinals were the last

couple of teams. The Raiders have their choice. They're just waiting for Seattle to be eliminated in the Super Bowl in the higher of their coach. But anyway, so the Vikings got rid of this guy Quasya doo fa men's of the GM. He's gone booted, kicked out, showing the door however you want to say it. And as the only one apparently that has my brain plugged in, you demand a Mallard monologue, And of course I'm still a little foggy here. I will try to explain what happened

in Minnesota. I have a theory on this. I have a theory on what happened with the Minnesota football team. So it's a good jumping off point. Let us discuss the question why. We'll get to the why. Why did the Vikings randomly poll as the GM quasy Dolpha mensa. And this is just a week before a little over a week before the Super Bowl and a long time after the season ended, right pretty much a month after

the season ended. So I've got peer one, Pigley Wiggly, and we'll put those together on the mini malle monologue. We're gonna make white chocolate Macadamian nut cookies. White chocolate Macadamian nut cookies. What we're gonna make so a the answer is why to why? The answer to why, it's very simple to an Oukham's Razors situation. The simplest answer is the easiest answer and the right answer, because ownership panicked. They panicked. Now, I'm not saying that Quzy adolpha mensa.

The GM there, this guy was doing a good job. I'm not saying that. I'm saying the normal protocol is, if you're gonna get rid of the GM, you do it in the regular season. Late in the regular season, you do it right after the last game. Therefore, you have your choice of who you want to bring in as the next A bunch of gms have been hired, and the music's pretty much done on the game of musical charity. So the theory is the owner the will family there in Minnesota, they panic full stop. And this

is not some kind of mystery novel. You do not even need to activate the MiB, the Mather Investigative Bureau. This is fear with a pulse. Minnesota's ownership group has been diagnosed here with a bad case of sd DS. All right, what is that? What is sd DS? That is Sam Donald's derangement syndrome. Is what it is? Sam Donald arrangementercentro. To rephrase this, the internet was howling at

the moon. The purple people. Eater's crowd turned into a barber shop quartet, and they were humming the chili's jingle, I want my baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back, baby back. That's where they were humming, I want my baby back, baby back, baby back. Instead of ribs, they wanted their quarterback and ownership blinked. That's it, period, Stop, it's what. Now. Seattle is in the super Bowl. I did see their supposedly for sale after the Super Bowl.

So if you want to put a couple of shekels together, we can buy the Seahawks. But anyway, how great would that be? How upset would no Stridinus be and JJ and Httin and crying Craig and blind emmet the Seahawk fan if I just went down and bought the Seahawks. Of course that could happen. If I went on a cross country bank robbery spree for the next fifty years, I could come up with enough money. Like the Chiefs superfan is currently locked up in the Gray Bar Hotel. Anyway,

so Seattle's in the Super Bowl. Suddenly the Vikings think they let the one go, the one that got Away's slip right through their fingers, which is absurd on just about every level. It's absurd. Here's why. If you think Sam Darnold is the reason that the Seattle Seahawks are in the super Bowl, you don't know ball. You don't You're incriminating yourself. That is not analysis, That is just superstition. Have you not been paying attention? That's like lighting candles

and blaming the furniture, Like, what are you doing? Dumping the general manage Again, this guy didn't do a great job. Fine, I get it. He didn't really do well. The draft has not been good. But getting rid of the GM was a sacrifice to the angry mob with the pitchforks and the torches and all that. Someone had to be tossed into the volcano, the metaphorical volcano, so the noise would stop and the football gods. More importantly, these social media matrix people demand it a pound of flesh, and

it just happened. The short straw was taken by the GM there quasi adolpha mensa. He was the guy, the GM there who took it. He was convenient haunted by things that go bumpity bump in the night, like talk radio, social media, the echo chamber, Watch out for the echo chamber. Now what about Peer one. I'm not talking about Peer one imports. I'm talking about Peer one exports. That's the issue here right out. You go see you later if

you act like an adult on this one. And I have an unpopular opinion, but I'm gonna stick to my opinion. I'm gonna die on this take on this mountain. So letting Sam Donald walk was not the problem. It was not. If you look at what Sam Donald did this year in Seattle, I'm reasonable. Don't shake your head, no, no, don't shake your head. No. I'm a reasonable observer. Sam Donald was by Sam Donald, measuring him by Sam Donald. He was solid. He wasn't spectacular. This was not one

of the great performances. He wasn't as good as Matthew Stafford or Drake may or someone like that. He wasn't And to circle back to our friend Roberto the bus driver using bus driver lingo, Sam Donald was not the bus driver for the Seahawks. He was a bus writer. He was the one paying the fare in the back of the bus. The numbers are right there. He had fourteen interceptions, near the bottom of the league second half of the season. It was the ninety nine, meaning nine

picks and nine touchdowns. That is a coin flip. And it's got a drinking problem. And the trend line matters. It does matter, Sam Donald. For all these people up in arms, Oh my god, his touchdowns year to year, if you go side by side from Minnesota Seattle, his touchdowns were down almost thirty percent from his season starting in the Twin Cities. The interceptions were up. Inconsistency still ravages Sam Donald. It's like a rash that goes away and comes back. You know, It's like you have a

gluten allergy and it comes back. This is who he is, Sam Donald. Will win a bunch of games for you in a month or two and then go out and in the Super Bowl a week from him tomorrow, he'll ride the vombit comment. That's it, So spare me the pearl clutching right the GM in this case, Uh, you know, this guy gets absolutely vaporized. Bye bye, Adolpha Mansa get out of here. So he gets vaporized. He's out. He's the guy to take the hit on this. And I

guess again this happens that that's how this works. Fine, but it wasn't accountability. It was appeasement. This was made for appeasement. Ownership heard the cacophony of shaky wisdom, mistook mistook that for wisdom, that just the noise and all that, And so they confused the pressure the banging on pots and pans as legitimate proof. And now they've gotten neither right, poltergeist peer pressure. When you don't know where the noise is coming from, what do you do? You start breaking

your own stuff? Like I think the noise is coming from the sofa. Let me pull all the cushions off the sofa and I'm gonna start fuxing around with it. Now I think it's coming from the dishwasher, So why don't I take everything out of the dishwasher, all the trays and all that, and I'm gonna take my screwdriver and kind of go around now, Okay, Page two. So the other question on this story, and I'll be brief.

This is a mini Mallor monologue, and there's some other things I want to talk about the question that I had on my mind. Though, if Sam Donald's departure, we can all agree knowledgeable people wasn't the main issue for the Vikings. What was meaning that that was not the crime. That's like jaywalking. They took a guy that had been a big spicy meat ball of Pooh and he played one year, played Okay, fell apart at the end. You

let him go. That's fine. The real issue I think we can agree is that they put in the grocery cart afterwards, meaning these are pigly wiggly problems. What is a pigly wiggly problem or the Pickli Wiggily is a great Southern grocery chain which is by far the greatest named store for shopping for food I've ever come across in my time on this planet, the Pigley Wiggily. But I'm getting to a picky wiggly problem is picking groceries. That's what this is. That's what all of this is.

The Vikings did not starve. They didn't become improverished because Sam Donald left. They starved because they bought the wrong meat. They did. Where's the beef? Well, what't Eddy? This is shopping malpre practice. That's the issue. And for those of you that are a little slow because it's the weekend and you're in the back of the room there and you're wearing your noise canceling headphones, letting Sam Donold walk was fine. We would have done the same thing. The

mistake is this. You thought you were buying Kobe beef and you came home, you took the bag, you took the beef out of the bag, and you said, where's the beef? And there was no Kobe beef. It was mince meat pie a Frankenstein food. You wanted Kobe beef, you got mince meat, the apples, the dried fruit, the almond paste, the booze, nothing that actually fills you up, and nothing you look forward eating. No one's ever woken up and said, I really want some of that that

mince meat today. That would really make me happy. I really want that. No one ever says that. And the butcher who made the call was crazy. This guy at Dolphamenza the GM there, he looked at the display case and said, that's the one right there, premium, I'd like that. He pointed at it, and then he took it and they put some plastic grap on it, and then he put it in his back. Wrong label, wrong cut, wrong century,

check the receipt. The Vikings hitched their purple wagon to JJ McCarthy, a Michigan man, a Michigan man who should have stayed at Michigan and coached at Michigan. Three years into his NFL. I remember first year he redshirted because he was hurt. Second year, this past year he played. And here we are sitting after two years and where are we at? So year three is upcoming and he is still the UI guy. Soft center, need refrigeration and not ready to serve. Will give you a massive case

of die die diarrhea. That is not a franchise quarterback. That is a dessert you leave out for too long, is what that is. And when you take a step back, it does fit the Vikings mindset. My entire life has been good enough is good enough? Now I have no skin in the game. We got a lot of friends in Minnesota. You guys have been great. You love the show.

I had a wonderful time at the Mermaid when we got together with Eke and Roseville, Minnesota and hollering James and all the al all the all the guys and those where all the good delis are all you guys that showed. It was wonderful. And again thanks to our friend spin Cycle Regina for making that happen. So the Vikings franchises like, well, they're never really that bad. They're just never consistently that good. It's not excellence, it's not domination.

It's just adequate. It's if the government was a football team, they'd be the Minnesota Vikings. It's government work football. It meets the minimal's standard. It passes inspection. And I go back to that word adequate because I feel like that's that's the word, you know. Don't go above and beyond the call of duty. Just do the bare minimum. Nothing inspiring, nothing bold, just a shrug with shoulder pads. And it is a cultural thing, right the Twin Cities. They love

play Minnesota and Ice. Right, Minnesota and Ice. One of the most amazing things I've be into was it's actually in Vegas, but it was four in the morning during the NFL regular season, and the in the Morning show from Kfan was there broadcasting at four in the morning, or I think they started then, might have been earlier. So I walk in. They invited me to come hang out with them. I walk in and it was insane.

It was bonkers. There's meat, sauce and all the boys on the stage and there were hundreds of people at four in the morning. All Minnesotans who were there to watch the morning show was it was great. So it was very nice. Right, you don't want to offend anyone, you know, swing too hard. If you don't swing too hard, you don't miss big. You don't just line up and you clap a little bit and hope the other team screws up first. And that's that and just how you

end up with a marinate of mediocrity. But you have optimism. So the foundation was already cracked, and you don't again, you don't blame the grocery store for what you cook. You blame the person that did the shopping and cook the meal. And right now the kitchen smells smells like leftovers, I would say. So the kill shot would be the story that came out this week, which was likely leaked more likely than not by a dosa mensa dopha mensa.

The GM there the former GM that the Vikings were looking at the quarterback duo of Anthony Richardson and Mac Jones, which is like, well, wait a minute, what do you do We have our guy, you said he was our guy. What are you doing?

billboard lawyers. I would venture I guess that there is no one, no one who lives in a city that has more billboard lawyers than Los Angeles. I'm just pointing that out. So, but I am clapping for these attorneys. And I know lawyers are usually the people that you tolerate the way you tolerate a long rain delay when you're at a baseball game. It's annoying, it's inevitable because you looked at the weather app and somehow it's still expensive because you're buying food and all that. But on

this one. I want to give these these lawyers the full Rocky Balboa montage, and let me explain why if the allegations are true, the San Francisco Giants, that's a baseball team, not a good one, did not just sell tickets. They sold the illusion of a price and then hit fans with the old razzle dazzle at the finish line. So if you know what I'm talking about, you might,

I don't know, maybe not, maybe not. So I saw this, so I was going to do a monologue about it during the week, and I didn't get to it because of some other football stuff, and I figured we had a little time here on a Saturdays, so I did want to talk about it. It's a passionate topic of conversation for me, So I will spare you all of the nitty gritty, right I will just I understand when when when you hear me say, hey, I like you know these these lawyers, the reason is because they're fighting

back against the up charging everyone. As far as the everyone does it thing, which some people everyone's doing it, don't care. That's not a defense, by the way, that is a confession. With better poster. It's like the cheating assstros. I just call them assholes. We're on the podcast. They're cheating assholes from Houston, right. So those guys that their

fan base, if you want to call them that. They're like, oh no, I've in the terrible and all those guys are like, oh yeah, yeah, Well everyone was doing it. Everyone was doing it. Okay. Well again, it's like getting pulled over for speeding and say, well, the officers, how fast were you going? Well, officer, I was going ninety nine miles. Well, you know the speed limit here is like sixty five. You can't go ninety nine. Well I know that, sir, but I was actually going the flow

of traffic. Everyone was going to the same speed. So what are you doing? But they still give you a ticket, They give you an expensive ticket. But here's the basic setup of this skullduggery, and it's a proposed class action suit. It's in federal court that says the giants advertised one price and then presto abreka dabra checkout. They added extra convenience and processing fees that were not disclosed up front, and what the lawsuit calls junk fees because that's what

they are. If this is true, allegedly inflating totals for hundreds of thousands of people that bought tickets to watch that bad baseball team. Now, the person named the plaintiff will call him Wand because that's his name. He claims that he bought two tickets that were advertised for ten dollars each, then watched the toll climb to twenty nine dollars after the fees all of a sudden appeared at checkout. That is not convenience in my world. That is what's

known as a shakedown with a digital receipt. Congratulations, and the piece demissons. The masterpiece is because the Internet is basically a mall kiosk. That's all it is, right, the Internet. They want you to buy stuff or watch porn, that's it. And so there's a countdown clock on here. The suit alleges that this guy Wan was he felt pressure by a timer, limiting the time to review details, enter payment

info and agree to terms. The classic but wait, there's more energy, except instead of a second set of steak knives, you get a third line item labeled because we can sucker, get that dumb money. Get that dumb money. Baby, you gotta do it all right, So get that dumb money anyway. So this is where my inner malar cynicism pops up. I put on the trench code, I hold the decoder ring. The whole trick is psychological. Now I've actually studied this

over the years. I'm fascinated by the things that people do in business to sell products, and people end up buying things. They think it's their own decision, but they're actually swayed. It's fascinating. When I worked at WEI briefly in Boston, I did a couple of years fill in nighttime shows at WI. While working at Fox Sports Radio. One of the other talk show hosts also had a full time job. He was a lollipop salesman. Doesn't that sound like it's out of a nineteen nineties comedy? A

guy traveling around as a lollipop salesman. And so I talked to him a couple of times about this, and he explained to me that the lollipop game, the way that it works, is that most of the people that buy lollipops didn't want to buy lollipops. They had no intention. They went into Target or Walmart or wherever. They didn't plan on getting any lollipops. However, it is strategic placement and they pay money. Was telling me, like, yeah, we've deals with all these big box stores and the grocery

chains like Kroger, and we put the lollipops. We've done market research. We know exactly where to put the lollipops when the person's putting their groceries on the thing that where their eyeballs are, where they look, and then we know a certain percentage of those people are hungry and they like lollipops and they haven't had one in a long time, and so they'll buy the lollipop. And so that's that's why they do it. It's a psychological trick, and you're not in this case, you're not buying a

ticket anymore. You're buying the sunk cost of fallacy. These sunk cost of fallacy. You see, once you've picked the seat, like on these websites or your phone, you pick the seat and you'll line the data up. You've already imagined having a soft pretzel, some garlic fries, that nice beer, the cold beer on the warm day. You text all your boys in the group chat. You've committed. You're emotionally there, you're primed to pay the nonsense fee just to avoid

starting over. It's not commerce. It's a hostage negotiation with better fonts. And you know the playbook right, because it has not changed in the last almost fifty years, going back to the nineteen eighties in the infomercial era. It's just upgraded from call now to tap now, same flim flam houckerism. It's just a different screen now. The greatest hits on this are supplies are limited. Translation, panic is profitable. You better get this or you're not gonna be able

to get it. Only a few left at this price, meaning there's urgency because you never know the price this is going to go up. Assign numbers to customers. This is also a great trick that translation on that congratulations you've been promoted to special. Now you have to pay extra because there's someone behind you. And the countdown clock, which is just classic fomo fear of missing out on the product. The clock is ticking. It's like a James Bond movie. You got the sticks of dynamite. You gotta

get this thing or else before the diamond dynamite blows up. Now, this is I ought to be clear. This is not just a San Francisco Giants thing. Although it is fun for me to take shots at the Giants as Jay Scoop and some others. No, they used to be a rival of the Dodgers. I think they've pretty much given up at this point. Dodgers are like secretariat compared to the Giants. But this lawsuit is framed as the third

of its kind. It's aimed at Major League Baseball teams in and it's all come in the last couple of months. Similar allegations made against the Boston Red Sox and the Washington Nationals. In the Red Sox case, for example, they're alleging the lawsuit a typical seven dollars order fee, which raises the obvious question, how does clicking purchase cost seven dollars to process? Is? Seriously, what are you doing? Is one person single handly carrying the electrons across the Charles River.

They're in Boston, what do they do? And then the Nationals lawsuit, which was filed in DC federal court, similarly claims years of junk fees cheating customers out of millions, cheating customers. It's not exactly subtle, of course, neither is the business model. So now the giants reportedly stopped charging these fees in July of twenty twenty four. They were forced to because at the time, the Biden administration put rules into as I understand it, to not allow these

in certain cases. And there's also a law in California, the People's Republic of California, the communist state, that has a law there, law SB four seventy eight. I believe it is honest pricing or hidden fees law, and it's illegal for most businesses to advertise a price that does not include the required fees et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, taxes and shipping and all that stuff. So that's in California. But let me do a little Benny the butcher here

and I'm gonna trim the fat. So the stopping is nice, the refunding is nice, like they stop, but what about the refund The lawsuit says fans haven't been paid back for the years of alleged junk fees. And if you're a fan, that part that hits you right because it's the it's the sports equivalent hits you in the nuts of getting called for holding after the touchdown and the being told well, I don't worry. We stopped, we stopped holding. So we're good. So great, What does the points you

took off the board? What happens to the points you took the board? Anything with the points you took off the board. No, you can't. You can't get those back. You took the points off the board. All right. So this is why again I am rooting for lawyers, legal haymakers. Body blows. Body blows. Not because I'm naive enough to think that every fee disappears forever, however, because somebody has to play watchdog while the rest of us suckers are

just trying to buy a couple of seats. Or you should not need you should not need an accounting fee or degree. Rather, they shouldn't need an accounting degree and a blood pressure cuff to buy tickets to a ballgame. And junk fees are the same monster and little different costumes. And it's one of those things. Once you hear about the trick, you can't unhear it. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. You start spotting it everywhere. It's

like the mal Ard militia of sleeper self. For example, some of the ones that really get up my it took us. The resort fees. That fee is like mugging with mints on the pillow. A resort fee so you can get a newspaper which nobody reads, and access to the gym which nobody uses. How about airline family seating fees, which turns parenting into a pay per view event. That's always nice. I love the late payment fees that multiply like rabbits rabbit, what up rabbit in a carrot patch.

You've got the overdraft fees that operate like a trapdoor. The living wage that one living wage restaurant surcharges. And I say this carefully and it should be addressed. You should pay a living wage, not by passing the buck with a line item that makes the customer feel like they're the bad guy. They're the villain. You've got termination fees for internet service. You've got to pay to break up. You've got out of network ATM fees because you're hungry

and you're in the neighborhood and you need cash. Online convenience fees. That's my favorite oxymoron. It's right up there with jumbo shrimp. Shrimp not supposed to be jumbo anyway. A lot of times. These fees are just ways, obviously for companies to gouge you and I, and they do it in stealth bomber mode to get it, or they get an unfair advantage over competitors and all that. But here's the deal. That's just the playboy. I want to be too dramatic. That's how they do it. So advertise low.

This is the oldest trick in the book. You advertise low. You hook the customer on the product and the price point. Then you fatten the built the last possible moment, when the person who's shopping's brain has already moved on from should I to fine, I'm doing it like that's the move there. That's the trick. Ration. And yes, I know that professional sports teams will argue that these fees fund operations, technology, staffing.

You can insert any kind of corporate jargon you want, and that's what they're going to say, which is okay, that's I know they're gonna say that, But put it in the price. Just raise a second. I go to Vegas and they have all these these junk fees. Just raise the price of the rooms. That's what you want. Just raise the price and give me a flat fee, and that's they'll pay it if I want to go. If not, I'll go, say somewhere else. But don't lure me in like the Giants did with a ten dollars ticket.

And then you do the math and you add on all these extra fees and all that, and two ten dollars tickets, you add nine dollars on. I'm already halfway down the water slide at that point. Because the thing about the fan, I would say, especially baseball fans more than some others, like you're loyal to a fall. There's nothing worse than a bad baseball team. You still go. You show up. People show up. Early in the season, weather's nasty, it's cold, it's rainy. It's cold and rainy.

Late in the season, in the middle oftentimes it's like a frying pan and you're sitting out there melting and it's nightmare time. And people show up. Weather in San Francisco's wild. You got foggy days, foggy nights, and you go in your bullpen pukes all over itself. You still show up. You got a clown car for a lineup, doesn't matter. You're there and you pay, and you watch, and you suffer and you celebrate it. And I think that all most fans ask for is maybe it's being

old fashioned here, just being a knucklehead. Is that the number you see is the number you pay, and not but wait, there's more, and not time's almost up. Check out now, because that's not a ticketing experience. That is a mugging with a countdown clock. So you got that. There you go, all right. It is the Ben Malar Show on the weekends. We'll be back tomorrow with the Ben Maler Show. We'll have a new episode of that tomorrow night. We've got the Fifth Hour Tomorrow the mail Bag.

On the fifth hour, we'll have Super Bowl week covers. I will be in San Francisco later in the week, so I look forward to that. But the Mailbag is tomorrow. Danny hopefully will join us. Have a wonderful rest of your Saturday, the last day of January twenty twenty six, and we'll catch you on the next Fifth Hour podcast. Aloha, my Felacia.